First, the good news: I’m done writing about wisteria, except that I must pass on a tidbit from a thoughtful reader named Joe who sent me an email last week recommending I fertilize my Aunt Dee vine to make it bloom and then, in a follow-up email, took that back. He had been to the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum and discussed the matter with a master gardener. Seems feeding just stimulates the plant to make more leaves at the expense of flowers.

Another reader, Cathy in Highland Park, sent me a photo of her pergola, identical to mine except that her 8-year-old Aunt Dee is blooming like mad. She prunes hard and removes all old wood, she says. Yeah, I do, too.

Now, the bad news: As always at this time of year, my plants are looking woefully undernourished. They gave it their all to catch up after our long, hard winter and maybe overdid it. They seem unable to fend off the annual attack of the four-lined plants bugs, and others just look pale.

I’ve been fretting over whether to give them a shot of fertilizer — yep, the kind you buy at the garden center — especially after revisiting organic advocate Michael Pollan on the topic. In a recent interview with Slate, he advocates a return from cornfed feedlot management of livestock that we consume as meat to grassland feeding as a way to help reverse global warming. He explained that carbon can either be released into the atmosphere, which causes warming, or returned to the soil.

The root mass the ruminant leaves behind decomposes and becomes a meal for nematodes, earthworms and other underground organisms. They turn the carbon in the roots into the soil. “This is how all of the soil on the earth has been created from the bottom up, not the top down,” Pollan says.

I’m looking at my garden and seeing that my plants, despite their annual meal of compost, are showing signs of malnutrition. I ask my gardening friends how they feed their plants and learn that even the most eco-friendly do provide some “top-down” nutrition as often as once a week. They do this without compromising the bottom-up integrity of what’s happening with all those nematodes and earthworms.

How? The purists know how to apply aged manure and other natural organic soil amendments and also where to find these things. Know anyone with a horse farm?

The rest use either a plant food that breaks down slowly, such as Osmocote, delivering extra chemicals only as needed over two to three months, or granular plant foods applied often. They argue that whether the label says the food is inorganic or organic matters not because it’s the top-down feeding itself that can be problematic — but only if it disturbs soil culture. If you follow the directions and don’t overdo it, the meal you give your plants won’t be toxic to the nematodes.

Some gardeners spray their gardens with a liquid fertilizer and insist they simply are speeding up the time frame. The plants get the food they need immediately. It doesn’t have to break down.

I decided to experiment. I applied several kinds of food in different parts of the garden, checking out earthworm activity beforehand to ensure all was well. Then I fired up the garden hose and sprayed a swatch of plants with liquid Miracle-Gro, then sprinkled Happy Frog inorganic food on an adjoining bed. A third section got only the time-release pellets.

Most good gardeners use liquid plant food only on plants growing in containers. I used to keep the water in one of my rain barrels spiked with the stuff. But last year, I tried something new: I placed worms in my pots. When the plants came in for the winter, the worms did, too. The plants looked fine in the spring, so I was feeling pretty smug until I read a thread on Garden Web on this topic and learned worms can throw off the nutrient balance in houseplants — something about their castings being too strong.

Any soil scientists out there who wish to weigh in, please do. I would love to stimulate a more helpful conversation for gardeners who, like me, are conflicted about what’s best for the livings things we’re so lovingly nurturing year after year. To feed or not to feed is a question that continues to have me flummoxed.

On top of my list is cutting back plants. Last week, it was the remains of spent catmint and other early June bloomers. This week, it’s the late-June-blooming hardy geraniums. You can cut most exhausted perennials hard to get new foliage growing and even a second flush of flowers.

When it comes to pruning, it’s the annuals that must have full and frequent attention because they keep flowering until they die — unless you neglect them and let them go to seed. Then they’ll get leggy and feeble and die young. Deadheading tricks them into thinking they must send up more flowers to replace the ones that were supposed to ensure their species’ survival by spreading the seed of the next generation.

How quickly a saturated soil turns dry and cracked when it stops raining buckets. It’s time to mulch those beds to help your plants through the hot and possibly dry weeks ahead. A layer of shredded bark keeps down weeds and shades the soil. Moisture evaporates slower in cooler soil. Mulch also improves the texture of the soil as it breaks down.

It is imperative to mulch the vegetable garden, especially if you’re growing tomatoes, whose leaves are much more likely to develop fungal issues if you let water from rain or your garden hose or sprinkler bounce off the soil and back onto the leaves’ undersides. Bacteria spreads infection. A mulch of straw or even plastic or old newspapers solves that problem. Alfalfa is great because it feeds the soil as it decomposes, just as it does as a cover crop.

Remember that your woodland plants typically prefer a low pH. You can please your acid-loving conifers (blueberries, too) by adding peat or another such amendment to lower pH. Hydrangeas with blue flowers (Endless Summer leaps to mind) also need a low pH unless you like your flowers on the pinkish side. The plants will do fine either way.

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